Peroxide Nation

There is a saying, that one learns something new every day. My something new learnt for today is that this saying is true. 

My something new learnt for yesterday, though, was not so much a new learning as an epiphany. There are, in all probability, more blondes in the city of Karachi alone than there are in the whole of Sweden, and I have to thank my friend Silas the Albino Monk once again for putting so succinctly in words the thoughts that were on the tip of my head. 

This realisation came to me in a sudden flash of, what else, blonde. In this case, the flash came from the hair of a mother and daughter pair who were behind me in the cramped aisles of a local supermarket. Thanks to their overzealousness to reach the Slim Fast shelves, the daughter did her best to hack me off at the ankles, using her shopping trolley as battering ram. There is a time and a place to be run over by a blonde bombshell, unexploded or otherwise, and it is normally a desert island with a notable absence of things such as irate mothers with too little sugar in their systems; unfortunately, the main aisle of a crowded supermarket did not qualify for these, or any other less printable reasons. 

As I turned round to issue a mute protest at this, what I consider to be the greatest discourtesy that one shopper can do to another (except perhaps reaching over someone’s shoulder to grab that last bottle of peroxide blond hair dye from the shelf), I was literally frozen in my spot at what I saw, to the considerable chagrin of the diet-conscious duo; for what I saw was a sea of gold. I believe the industry term for this is ‘streaking’, which if you have witnessed cricket at Lords on a sunny Sunday afternoon, has a completely different, alcohol fuelled connotation. There were at least a dozen women in the aisle that goes from one end of the supermarket to the other, and all but one of them had some variant of flax in their locks. 

Flax! Thought I. It was like that (really quite average) movie Children of the Corn, with a town full of creepy blonde children with telekinetic powers that I saw in the Summer of ’96 just because there was a crackdown on pirated movies on my local video wallah and every release of Pulse Global got rented by default. And throughout my day, open as I now was to this new phenomenon, I saw they were indeed everywhere. From overzealous blonde streaks to full-blown Golden Sunrise and everything in between, it seems that our women are taking to the bottle en masse. 

I wonder what this growing trend can be attributed to. Not being of the female persuasion, I cannot claim any insights into a woman’s mind beyond those that one gets via osmosis through living in a house full of women all his life. I would like to think that I am neither a misogynist nor a chauvinist, but I do fear that some of what is to follow may result in the ashes of certain items of intimate apparel being delivered to my door. For I feel that this trend can be attributed to one of three things: frugality, insecurity or sheep-walkery. 

Frugality could be a reason, for grey shows up less when hair is of a lighter hue, thus entailing less frequent visits to the “beauty pall-er” – and pall-ers they are indeed, for their work is frequently quite ap-pall-ing. Insecurity with ones’ self image and the desire to follow an ideal of beauty that stems from the West is, of course, not something that is restricted to our nation, for the same is true most famously in Japan. The possible linkage between many Pakistani blondes being of “a certain age” and the quality of Scandinavian cinema intended for “mature” audiences in the era when their now-menfolk were in their adolescent years is not really a discussion for this forum. 

However, I feel that the most likely reason for this growing trend is the bhhed chaal mentality that a large part of all society, not just ours, has been cursed with. In the first instance, the women most likely to choose a lighter hue for their hair would be the ones who spend a significant part of their time in the West, the better to blend in. These ladies are the most likely to be the opinion leaders in the highest echelons of our society, and their preferences and trends would then filter through to the rest of the population. Their men also spend a lot of quality time in the west, so this could be a subconscious effort to keep the men on the straight and narrow but still give them a pale shade of a forbidden fruit. 

Whatever the reason, this tendency does appear to be spreading. Colouring of hair for reasons other than to stem the flow of time was, a few years ago, considered the preserve of the affluent ladies that lunch. No longer, though. Any salon worth its salt now has, I am reliably informed, a dedicated staff who deals with turning their clients’ coifs a lighter shade of pale. And it would take just one quick stroll round Gulf Shopping Mall to confirm that the recipients of these image transplants are getting younger. 

Of course, that is neither here nor there, for is it not said (often by the folically challenged) that one should never trust or do business with anyone who changes hair colour to hide their age; for if the person can lie to themselves, then they can do the same to you. 

In closing, I would request my female readers two things: firstly, please don’t send me any hate mail; my credit card bills are traumatising enough as it is. And secondly, before you reach for the bottle, consider the damage that you are doing to your roots, and I don’t just mean your follicles.

Originally published in Dawn, April 2008. The link to the edited article, as published, is below:

http://archives.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/080420/dmag6.htm